


MJ When She's Older

by compo67



Series: Chicago Verse [38]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Domestic Dean Winchester, Domestic Fluff, Domestic Sam Winchester, M/M, POV Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-07
Updated: 2013-07-07
Packaged: 2017-12-17 23:38:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/873229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/compo67/pseuds/compo67
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set soon after the boys buy the house in Chicago Verse, they venture out to IKEA to pick up a few things. Their conversation turns more serious than expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	MJ When She's Older

IKEA is dangerous.

 

Sam has to practically drug and drag Dean out of the place.

“You’re making a scene!” Sam snaps at his brother, who is standing there, arms crossed over his chest, pouting like a god damned five year old.

“ _No_ ,” Dean growls. “ _You_ are making a scene.”

“We’ve been here for _two_ hours, Dean!”

Dean doesn’t reply to that. Instead he turns away from Sam and ignores him. Sam’s mouth hangs open in shock and anger. The place smells like Swedish meatballs, plastic, and stale air. Everything is so tiny and cheap and fucking annoying. It’s crowded with obnoxious twenty-something couples making out like there’s no tomorrow in the display rooms and families with swarms of unruly children and their elbows and legs everywhere.

There’s no place to run. No place to get away from every fucking thing wrong with this place.

Sam gives up. He folds. He taps out. Reluctantly, he drags himself over to Dean and grunts his surrender. Dean huffs and grumbles something about wanting a hot dog and Sam better pay for it.

 

“How can you eat that?” Sam asks, watching Dean eat the hot dog like he hasn’t had a meal in years. As if Mrs. Martinez didn’t feed them before they made their trek out to the suburbs. It’s disgusting. Say what you want about Dean and his looks; yeah, the man is gorgeous, the kind of good-looking American man that many, Sam included, are drawn to, but this? This is a crime.

“Bet I could eat two at a time,” Dean says with a smirk and picks up Sam’s barely eaten hot dog.

“Oh god,” Sam groans and cradles his face in his hands. “I can’t.”

“Watch, Sammy. C’mon, this is how men eat!”

“I don’t know you,” Sam hisses, hiding his face and hunching over, trying to make himself smaller. His brother only cackles through the food he’s stuffing in his face. The hot dogs cost fifty cents apiece. Sam doesn’t even want to know what they’re made of; they taste and feel like pork flavored plastic.

“You’re such a fucking delicate flower,” Dean mutters and lets out a burp. “We can’t all eat with our pinkies up and napkins on our laps.” Sam hears the crinkle of paper and napkins, signifying that Dean is done—for now—humiliating him by eating.

“Please just stop.”

“Okay, Jesus, let’s go. I wanna go look at the as-is section again. I’m telling you, that coffee table is a fucking killer deal.”

There are two reasons they are here: they’ve just moved into their house in a neighborhood south of the Loop in Chicago so they need things previously unneeded by their nomadic stays in motels. Paper plates and cups lasted about a month into moving. And, because Mrs. Martinez asked them to pick up a child’s sized bookcase for one of her granddaughters. It needs to last a while—and she wants it to be pink—so instead of searching thrift stores and flea markets, they decided to make the hour drive to IKEA.

“It’s got really sharp corners, Dean,” Sam grumbles, following Dean, his hands stuffed into his jeans.

“So? Not like I have to baby proof the damn thing.”

It’s such a cast off statement. Such a not-a-big-deal thing to say.

But then it is.

It is a big deal.

Dean seems to realize what he’s just said but he doesn’t know what to do either, so they walk on in tense, awkward silence. The coffee table Dean had been looking at is no longer in the as-is section, which means someone snatched it up.

“Fuck if that ain’t the god damned way of things,” his brother huffs. He moves restlessly, pacing back and forth in small loops, hand on the back of his neck. “Let’s go back up.”

Sam wants to protest. Wants to lay down his best puppy eyes and get the hell out. He’d give a lot of things just to be able and go back to being mortified by Dean eating in public. For some reason, he follows Dean—ain’t _that_ the god damned way of things—and they take a giant elevator crammed full of people up to the third floor. Dean easily pushes past the sea of people who are packing the children’s wing of IKEA on a Saturday morning.

Just when Sam is about to complain or ask where they’re going—or what they’re _still_ doing here—Dean stops in front of a display room. It’s surprisingly empty, considering how many people are milling around, and it’s next to one of the few windows in the place; sunlight cascades down and drapes over the soft pink hues of the room. A plain, simple whitewashed twin bed is covered in delicate, baby pink canopy netting. There are a few more decorations carefully placed throughout the room, all of them pink.

A pair of tiny ballet slippers lay by the bed, as if its occupant is due back at any moment.

Two storybooks are open on the bed. Sam’s not sure if they’re purposefully there or the product of careless customers. It doesn’t seem to matter to Dean, who steps forward and picks up one of the books. He flips through it, a tender expression on his face that Sam rarely sees. The sunlight brings out his freckles.

“I would’ve named her Mary Jo. Maybe called her MJ when she got older. No dating til she’s thirty—at least.”

Dean smiles for a moment, shakes his head, and puts the book back on the bed, his fingers lingering for a moment. He doesn’t look at Sam. There’s too much on his face to make direct eye contact, but Sam can read him anyway. “I don’t… I don’t know how it would’ve happened, you know? Whether you’d wanna be her dad, her papa, or just her Uncle Sam. But you’d teach her how to read and I’d teach her how to punch the lights out of the boys in her class that pulled on her pigtails. You’d be in charge of braiding her hair because even with those gigantic hands of yours, Sammy, you still got more talent than I do in shit like that. I… I’d make pancakes for us every Sunday. Sneak some chocolate chips in there when you’re not looking so you can’t bitch at me for givin’ her too much sugar. I’d tell her to kick it in the ass for every test at school. I’d teach her how to fix up cars. I’d send her off to kindergarten and college and both times— _both_ fucking times—I’d still feel like she was breaking my heart.”

A page over the intercom is in the background. The sound of crowds of families and couples moving is constantly around them.

But Sam’s focus, all of his attention is on the man in front of him.

“Maybe if our lives had been different, little brother, we could’ve always had that.” A hardened look covers Dean’s face. Sam knows he’s got to reach out before it completely seals over.

He does the first thing he can think of.

Reaching out, he grabs Dean by the front of his shirt and roughly pulls him in for a kiss that’s more brutal and clumsy than soft and romantic. Dean doesn’t taste like the rom-com kiss that’s supposed to happen here. He tastes like plastic meat, mustard, and soda. His lips are a little chapped. Their teeth clack together twice. Sam smashes their noses together and goes deeper, his tongue searching out Dean’s mouth, licking in with broad, forceful sweeps.

This is the part, Sam thinks, where they’re supposed to break apart and whisper sweet promises about how it’s not too late. Where he’s supposed to tell Dean they can still have her. She _can_ be a reality.

But the Winchesters are not part of a rom-com.

They don’t have the storyline of one of the many movies he’d stay up late watching with Jess, as they shared a tiny couch in their apartment, flicking popcorn at each other.

That feels like lifetimes ago.

And Sam is forty years old.

He’s saved the world twice over. He’s been to hell and back. He’s bled and been bled on.

Every year he wonders if he’s helping or hurting Dean by being in this… whatever it is… with him. And every year he can’t seem to stop it, call it quits, or walk away from him. Buying a house together now still doesn’t seem real.

Like it wasn’t real two nights before, at one in the morning, to find Dean in his boxers, sitting on the patio with a guitar he got from who knows where. Strumming on it with practiced, calloused fingers, singing so clear and easy, his voice blending from deep and gravelly to light and crisp. Like it wasn’t real that after the last notes were played, Sam dragged Dean back to his bed and pinned him down and _took_.

“I bought the house for us, Dean,” Sam murmurs. “Just for us.”

Sam rests his hands on Dean’s shoulders. There’s an inch of space between them.

“This is something I have to work out, you know?” Sam continues. Neither of them are looking directly at the other again. “I wanted her too. And I wanted her with you. But it’s… complicated. Just give me time.”

They waiver on this subject, like they do with most topics that involve feelings and emotions and actual heart-to-heart conversations. Sometimes it seems like Dean wants a kid around, sometimes not. Sometimes it seems like Sam wants a kid around, sometimes not. They had a small argument about it right before they signed for the house.

 

“There’s only two rooms and that den,” Dean had said, inspecting things over for the third time.

“Yeah, one for you, one for me. All we need.”

“Guess a spare would be nice. Room to grow.”

“If you want a sewing and crafts room, you could just ask.”

 

Sam hadn’t exactly been that receptive to what Dean had really been saying at the time, but he’s processed it a few times since. Dean’s on the let’s-do-it team this year. Sam isn’t.

As much as he can almost see her, he can’t make her into a reality.

They need time for themselves. They need time to figure out how they work together without bullets and blood and sacrifice. Some stitches wash out, some have to be taken out. Sam knows they’re at the stage where they’re just starting to take out some major stitching and scars will be forming. But some scars aren’t forever.

The Impala is packed with more than evidence of their former lives. It’s packed with memories and consequences and reminders and triggers for panic attacks and flashbacks that are very real to both of them still. She doesn’t just blast classic rock. She blasts memories so powerful Sam swears sometimes he hears voices inside her. Whispers of every being—supernatural or not—that has ever occupied one of her leather seats. Especially John.

“Yeah, Sam,” Dean murmurs and presses his mouth to Sam’s. “All the time you need.”

Pulling apart—because it’s sunk into them where they are—they finally look directly at each other. Dean gives Sam a goofy smile and Sam rolls his eyes.

“Dude, we’ve been here for _two_ hours and _still_ haven’t found a bookcase for Mrs. Martinez,” Sam reminds Dean, trying not to sound like he’s whining.

“Well, perfection takes time, Sammy. You should know that.”

Sam can’t help but laugh.

“Yeah, Dean. I do. I just wanna get the hell out of here.”

**Author's Note:**

> I meant to write smut and then this happened. I can't leave this verse alone. (Also, I hate IKEA.)


End file.
